CONTINUALLY STRIVE

In the past four columns I have been discussing the steps to be followed in implementing a total quality management program.

Seven that have already been addressed are: Formulate a vision of what it is you mean by total quality management; get top management involved from the start; focus on customer needs including internal customers such as employees who help provide the goods and services that the customers buy; set total quality management objectives and organize the business to attain these goals; train the employees to use the necessary statistical process tools; empower the employees; and recognize and reward people for doing a good job.

The eighth and final step is to continually strive to improve the quality of your goods and services. This emphasizes the fact that total quality management is an ongoing process.

Many firms have introduced total quality management and found that it produced only short-run results. One of the major reasons for the failure of the program was that the company did not build in a continual improvement philosophy. Once the employees introduced a couple of quality improvement changes, they stopped trying.

"We've done everything we can," they would note.

One way to ensure that the employees continually improve is to have them put together a list of all those things that need to be changed if quality is to be improved. These can range from simple rules and procedures for getting the work done to training in interacting more effectively with other departments or with customers. Then each department can form a small group to deal with one of these problems.

When it has been resolved, they can then go on to another problem on the list. As the list gets shorter, the group can meet with a facilitator and collectively construct another list for improving work performance and quality.

Even if work groups are unsure of new areas for improvement, the facilitator can help out and elicit ideas from them.

Another way to keep the focus on improvement is by teaching the employees how to use benchmarking. This is a process for identifying better approaches to doing the work, and there are a number of ways that this can be done.

The simplest is to have work groups look around the company and identify other groups or departments that seem to be highly efficient. What makes these latter groups so efficient? Perhaps the personnel have better equipment than any other department. Or maybe these workers have had more training. Or perhaps they simply have a better team work attitude and so they work together more harmoniously.

In any event, there are things that people in every organization are doing that can be of value to others in the business. By benchmarking these more effective practices and then copying them, work groups throughout the firm can become more efficient.

Another way to benchmark is to find out what the competition is doing that makes it effective and copying these ideas.

For example, if your major competitor has just given its sales force new laptop computers that can be used to link up with the company's mainframe and enter customer orders directly from the latter's place of business, perhaps your sales force should have similar technology so it can match the effectiveness of the competition. Another way to benchmark is to study industry publications and business magazines and news-papers such as The Wall Street Journal. These sources can give you some excellent insights regarding what is going on in the industry and help you anticipate and respond to evolving trends.

The important thing to remember about continual improvement is that there is always another way to improve the quality of your goods and services.

If you keep looking for those that provide you a competitive edge, you will never stop striving to be a total quality management company and these efforts will pay off on the bottom line.

Just remember this final idea: Quality is determined by the customer, not by you. So in deciding what needs to be done to maintain the highest quality, let your customers guide your thinking and be prepared to listen, to learn and to respond appropriately. This is the essence of total quality management.